He's currently embroiled with M Night Shyamalan's next Night Chronicle Reincarnate, but according to the LA Times, Daniel Stamm's next film will be a remake of Pascal Laugier's **Martyrs.
The extraordinarily brutal 2008 French horror is, on the surface, about two young women who've grown up together in an orphanage facing down a disturbing past, but, as Stamm points out, "every time you think you know where it's going, it goes somewhere else." Beginning as a home-invasion revenge-thriller, it takes a turn into J-Horror when one of the girls seems to be being haunted by a ghoul, before entering Hostel territory with the discovery of a torture basement and a secret cult, and then veering into existential musings on martyrdom. With flaying.
It is total madness, not least because it was conceived and produced more-or-less on-the-hoof by Laugier and his team. It'll be very difficult to "reimagine" Martyrs with a more coherent screenplay without taming it and pulling its teeth.
Taming it does seem to be the agenda though. "Martyrs is very nihilistic," says Stamm. "The American approach that I'm looking at would go through all that darkness but then give a glimmer of hope. You don't have to shoot yourself at the end." Tell that to Catherine Begin.
Stamm's specific take on the material is "If you have a best friend in the world and she goes crazy, how much do you owe this friend to go down with them? It's much more than a horror film."
With Twilight producer Wyck Godfrey behind it, and a draft script by Mark L Smith (Vacancy, The Hole 3D), we're not sure we're with him on his journey. But **The Last Exorcism **and A Necessary Death are great, and Reincarnate is shaping up nicely, so maybe, maybe, there's hope for Martyrs after all...